Poetry Ping Pong – An announcement!

Thanks to an amazing amount of hard work, organisation and administration on the part of Daniel Haynes, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we shall be going to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year with our show, ‘Poetry Ping Pong’.

To be honest I never thought we’d get in. It’s as part of the Free Fringe organisation, which means that all though we don’t get paid, we don’t have to pay ( much) to be a part of it. And having been to the Fringe twice before as a viewer, it’s something I’d always wanted to do.

So what’s Poetry Ping Pong all about?

It’s 5000AD and humanity has changed beyond recognition. Only two remnants of 21st century culture remain, albeit twisted, mutated into a new blood sport they call Poetry Ping Pong. The legends of poetry through the ages are resurrected, then pitched together in horrible, gladiatorial combat. Only two remain. Robert Garnham showed his worth by knocking out the bookies favourite, a cyborg TS Eliot reconstruction in the semis. And Daniel Haynes, slipped into the final by vanquishing a genetically extracted bio-slurdge Pam Ayres thing.

That’s the premise, anyway.

So we are putting on this show, and so far Dan has got us on the bill at the Bath Festival too, as well as the Barnstaple Fringe with our other show, ‘Bard Science’.

And I’m really looking forward to it, because it makes everything kind of official. I’ve always wanted to be a part of something like this. So for the next couple of months we shall be writing and practising and rehearsing and coming out with promotional material and all the other things that Real Poets Do.

On Tuesday we went to Barnstaple to look for a venue to perform in and we ended up in the science labs of the community college. The science teachers showed us round and interrupted the sixth form lessons to show us the different types of rooms that they had. The students seemed well behaved and only a few of them sniggered at the strange people who were standing in the doorway!

So that’s what’s coming up, then. Look out 2014, here we come!